Autism, Narrative, and Emotions: On Samuel Beckett's Murphy

This essay explores Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy in order to illustrate the ways in which cognitive disorders such as autism bring to the foreground the links between illness, emotions, and narrative. Starting from the premise that the representation of autistic spectrum disorders presents specific problems for literary interpretation, I suggest that Murphy represents autism both at the level of the eponymous hero's characterization and through the discursive and rhetorical disposition of the text as a whole. I outline the concept of a metonymic circle in order to map out the ways in which, towards the end of the novel, the text's inherently realist orientation is disrupted by a series of discursive transpositions between Murphy and Mr Endon, himself a mild schizophrenic. I draw provisional conclusions about the differences between the literary representation and criticism of illness and the process that pertains in real-life medical diagnosis, while also touching upon some implications for interdisciplinarity.